Teaching future teachers to code — Programming and computational thinking for teacher students

Programming is one of the key assets in the modern society. In addition to teaching programming to future programmers, it has become more and more important to teach it alongside computational thinking to all students. We designed and implemented a programming course aimed for teacher students at our university. The goal of the course was to teach programming, computational thinking and the methods and tools used in programming education. The course was divided into two parts: first, the students were taught basic programming skills by utilizing tutorial-based learning with automatically assessed electronic exercises and play-based programming tasks. In the second part, the students utilized the acquired skills by teaching programming integrated into mathematics to children at elementary school level. The students worked really hard throughout the course, completing more than 90 % of all tasks in average. Moreover, the feedback from the tutorial sessions and the practice lessons at schools was mainly positive.